Ellsberg: What if Hitler Had Dropped the Bomb? October 19, 2010

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Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2010/09/29/The_Bomb_Daniel_Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg, the man responsible for leaking the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971, imagines how nuclear weapons would be viewed today if Germany had used them in World War II. Because they would not have changed the outcome of the war, Ellsberg claims they would be branded "criminal, murderous" tools of Nazi desperation.

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This excerpt is taken from a discussion on Howard Zinn's "The Bomb," featuring Daniel Ellsberg. This program was recorded in collaboration with City Lights Bookstore, on September 29, 2010.

As an active WWII bombardier returning from the end of the war in Europe and preparing for combat in Japan, Howard Zinn read the headline Atomic Bomb Dropped on Japan and was glad—the war would be over. "Like other Americans," writes Zinn, "I had no idea what was going on at the higher levels, and had no idea what that 'atomic bomb' had done to men, women, children in Hiroshima, any more than I ever really understood what the bombs I dropped on European cities were doing to human flesh and blood."

During the war, Zinn had taken part in the aerial bombing of Royan, France, and in 1966, he went to Hiroshima, where he was invited to a "house of rest" where survivors of the bombing gathered. In this short and powerful book, the backstory of the making and use of the bomb, Zinn offers his deep personal reflections and political analysis of these events, and the profound influence they had in transforming him from an order-taking combat soldier to one of our greatest anti-authoritarian, anti-war historians. - City Lights

Daniel Ellsberg is a former United States military analyst who, while employed by the RAND Corporation, precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of US government decision-making about the Vietnam War, to The New York Times and other newspapers.